At INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.

June 28, 2012

Team Cul de Sac: Cartoonists Draw
the Line at Parkinson’s. Edited by Chris Sparks. Andrews McMeel. $29.99.

There is nothing new
about cartoonists ardently espousing causes.Thomas Nast brought down the notorious Boss Tweed and his corrupt Tweed
Ring with his single-panel cartoons in the 19th century; Walt Kelly
took on McCarthyism in the 1950s, when so many in the creative community
cowered before Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy’s assaults; Patrick McDonnell
uses Mutts today to explore the
plight of endangered animals and to argue, through “Shelter Stories” strips,
for the importance of adoption.But
cartoon explorations of diseases, and the use of cartoon art to raise awareness
of those illnesses and money to fight them, are relatively new.Tom Batiuk of Funky Winkerbean has been a trailblazer in the field, with Lisa’s Story (2000) and Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe (2007)
about breast cancer, and the bold step of having his strip’s title character
featured in My Name Is Funky…and I’m an
Alcoholic (2007).Even before these
books, Batiuk and Chuck Ayers had created Safe
Return Home (1998), using characters from the Crankshaft strip in a sensitive and moving exploration of
Alzheimer’s disease.

It is in this
honorable line that Team Cul de Sac,
a creation of Web designer and comic aficionado Chris Sparks, belongs.Richard Thompson, creator of one of the best
and most highly regarded comic strips of recent years, Cul de Sac, has Parkinson’s disease, although so far there is no
evidence that the incurable neurodegenerative condition has affected his
writing or drawing.Sparks’ idea was to
enlist dozens of cartoonists to create art based on Thompson’s characters,
assemble all the work into this book, and auction the original drawings and
paintings online, with proceeds of the auction (plus some of the proceeds from
sale of the book) to go to Parkinson’s research by being donated to the Michael
J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

The idea was not only a thoughtful one but also, as it
turns out, an artistically fruitful one.The contributions range from the merely wonderful to the truly
outstanding.Bill Amend (FoxTrot) shows four-year-old Alice and
her eight-year-old brother, Petey, as FoxTrot
characters.Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott (Zits) show Alice’s father’s tiny car, a
recurring element of Cul de Sac,
trying vainly to get past Jeremy Duncan’s gigantic sneakers, a recurring
element of Zits.Children’s-book illustrator Stacy Curtis
offers a portrait of Miss Bliss, who teaches Alice and her preschool friends at
Blisshaven Academy.Greg Evans has the
title character of Luann and Alice
making catty comments to each other.Paul
Gilligan has Poncho of Pooch Café
trapped in the cage that usually houses Mr. Danders, the Cul de Sac guinea pig.Cathy
Guisewite has her now-retired Cathy
title character show up with chocolate at Alice’s family’s house.Rick Kirkman of Baby Blues shows how to create a comic-book character, using his
character Wanda MacPherson and Thompson’s Petey as parallel examples.There are also contributions by fan Sandy
Jarrell and eight-year-old Raymond Jarrell, by Lynn Johnston of For Better or For Worse, by Ron
Ferdinand of Dennis the Menace, by
Patrick McDonnell of Mutts, by Stephan
Pastis of Pearls Before Swine, by Garry
Trudeau of Doonesbury, by Lincoln
Peirce of Big Nate, by Mark Tatulli
of Liō, by Mort Walker
of Beetle Bailey, by Jim Davis of Garfield, and even by the notoriously
reclusive Bill Watterson of Calvin and
Hobbes – in all, works by illustrators and animators and editorial
cartoonists and graphic-novel creators and comic-book artists and
caricaturists.Single-panel works,
drawings, paintings, multi-panel strips, works that pull Thompson’s characters
into other worlds or introduce other worlds’ characters into his – everything
is here, and just about all of it is marvelous.In fact, all of it is
marvelous in terms of the spirit of pulling together, of helping Thompson and,
through him, all those afflicted with Parkinson’s disease.And every purchaser of this book – may there
be many! – is also contributing in his or her own way.

“Cause” cartooning always risks becoming heavy-handed,
but the great cartoonists who do it manage to avoid coming on so strongly that
they turn people off instead of on to the seriousness of their concerns.Thompson himself is never heavy-handed, and
is in fact not a contributor to Team Cul
de Sac except in his brief introduction and through the reprint in the book
of a Washington Post profile about
him that was published last year.But
Thompson’s spirit is as much a part of this book as are his characters.It would be naïve to think that any
collection of art, even one as well-intentioned and well-executed as this, will
be enough to find a cure for a disease as serious as Parkinson’s.But it would be a mistake not to find this attempt absolutely
wonderful, not only for its intentions but also for the truly wonderful riffs
on Thompson’s unique comic contributions that Sparks and the many marvelous
artists here have made possible, working as a team.

We live in a weirdly
improbable universe.A science-fiction
story once imagined an object whose shape was defined by pi being equal to 3 –
an utter impossibility whose consequences would be quite unimaginable, since
there is no way we can conceive of any such object or figure out how it could
appear in our universe, where pi is an irrational number just a bit larger than
3.14.That teeny-tiny difference,
between 3 and 3.14-plus, is literally enough to define a universe.So what are some things that can occur in ours – and, in fact, do, no
matter how strange and unlikely they seem?University of Sydney astronomer Bryan Gaensler discusses quite a few of
them in Extreme Cosmos – including,
for instance, a neutron star that is the roundest object known and another that
rotates 716 times per second.

Gaensler’s 10 chapters
deal with extremes of temperature, light, time, size, speed, mass, sound,
electricity and magnetism, gravity, and density.Such concepts as speed, size, gravity, mass,
time and light may quickly come to readers’ minds when thinking about the
universe – but sound?Yes: “The deepest
note yet identified belongs to a galaxy cluster, a conglomeration of several
hundred galaxies and hot gas…often nicknamed the ‘Perseus Cluster’ because of
its location in that constellation.” But
what does it mean to produce the
deepest note known, and how do we know that is what this galaxy cluster does?Understanding that requires knowing a bit
about what sound is and how it is produced, and Gaensler explains the basics
clearly and entertainingly, using the mundane examples of an underground subway
train approaching a station and an airplane breaking the sound barrier to jump
off into matters that are similar in space (the process of sound production is
the same) and ones that are different (the speed of sound is space is “22,000
miles per hour, about 30 times faster than the speed of sound in Earth’s
atmosphere”).

The chapter on
extremes of time starts by explaining why children ask “are we there yet?” and
moves into a discussion of the metallicity of a star, “the cosmic clock that
allows us to search for the oldest stars.”This chapter includes an explanation of why SDSS J1029 is considered the
oldest known star and just why “the sky is a time machine.”Elsewhere, the discussion of size not only
includes the gigantism of the universe itself and of certain objects in it but
also explains about “a variety of particles that have no size at all” and the
fact that the size of an electron “must be less than 0.0000000000000000004% of
an inch.”The chapter on electricity and
magnetism moves from the surprising statement that “planets, stars, and even
entire galaxies are all magnetic” to a consideration of the “marvelous
detective story” that led to the discovery of “an extremely rare species of neutron
star known as ‘magnetars’” – the strongest magnets in the universe.

And so it goes, from
chapter to fascinating chapter, from an explanation of “autosomal dominant
compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst” (the tendency to sneeze when one’s eyes
experience bright sunlight) to a discussion of why it is not weakened gravity that causes astronauts to float when aboard
the International Space Station.What
Gaensler does particularly well is relate everyday concepts and experiences to
extremely-difficult-to-imagine ones, and present his comparisons and analyses
in easy-to-follow language with a minimum of jargon and math and as much levity
as possible (for example, one heading in the chapter on density is “Great balls
of pasta”; another in the same chapter is “Bubbles of nothing”).Extreme
Cosmos does not attempt to provide any sort of strong scientific grounding
in what makes the universe tick, nor does it ask readers to know large amounts
of math, physics or astronomy to understand the phenomena it describes.What it does, and does exceptionally well, is
to use an investigation of extreme phenomena to shed light on the
far-less-extreme ones within which we live, producing a greater appreciation of
the work that astronomers do in exploring complex phenomena while helping
readers understand one reason these scientists do what they do: from a sense of
awe and wonder, which Gaensler generously shares with everyone who tours the
cosmos with him.

There is something of
a cottage industry – more than a cottage industry, in fact – in the re-release
of classical recordings from the many decades in which physical media (78-rpm
and 33-rpm records, open-reel tape, audiocassettes, etc.) dominated listener
experiences of music.Many of these
older analog performances are exceptionally fine, featuring musicians equal to
or better than any playing today, and advances in sound reproduction have made
it possible to clean up and improve the sometimes-pinched audio for an era in
which digital recordings with very full sonic characteristics have become the
norm.Companies such as Brilliant
Classics, ICA and Newton Classics have assembled entire catalogues of
re-releases that range from the merely interesting to the really splendid, and
other companies have delved into their vaults to find worthy older recordings
that modern listeners may still find worthwhile.

No company has more
depth in its archives than Sony, and its decision to produce a line of
well-priced boxed sets of outstanding re-releases of older recordings is a
particularly welcome one.Like other
boxes of similar types, these are bare-bones productions, containing no liner
notes or information about the music or artists other than movement timings and
data about when each recording was made.But the recordings themselves are so worthy, and in some cases so
historically important, that they are highly valuable to have in any form.The six-CD set of performances by Jascha Heifetz
(1901-1987) is a perfect example.The
Lithuanian-born violinist was one of the greatest violin virtuosi of all time,
with absolutely astonishing technique whose precision was unequaled and whose
intense tone quality was distinctive among performers of his generation, and indeed
those of earlier and later ages.Heifetz
was so good that he made even the most difficult concertos seem like études, tossing off the complexities
of Brahms or Sibelius as if they could be handled by a three-year-old (which Heifetz
was when he started playing the violin).There was a light, shimmering quality to his playing that was entirely
consistent in all works – and was the sole significant weakness in his
performances, since it tended to make Mozart sound rather too much like Bruch
or Prokofiev.He also tended to
overshadow the conductors with whom he worked, and indeed ended up making
recordings with some second-tier maestros rather than more-forceful ones.

But although his
playing can be nitpicked, it was magnificent, and hearing it is a genuinely
uplifting and thoroughly remarkable experience.Nearly every piece in the Heifetz retrospective on the RCA label is at
the pinnacle of available versions of the music.There is a poised, elegant Beethoven with the
Boston Symphony and Charles Munch, from 1955; a tremendously exciting
Tchaikovsky with the Chicago Symphony and Fritz Reiner, from 1957; a stately
and surprisingly transparent Brahms, also with Reiner, from 1955; a dramatic
Sibelius from 1959 that remains unsurpassed even though here the Chicago
Symphony’s conductor, Walter Hendl, is a touch timid; a sweeping Bruch No. 1
with the New Symphony Orchestra of London and Sir Malcolm Sargent from 1962,
not the best accompaniment but a highly involving performance nevertheless; and
a simply splendid Mendelssohn, from 1959, again with Munch and the Boston
Symphony.Even the lesser concertos here
– such as Vieuxtemps No. 5 (1961: Sargent again) and Rózsa (1956: Hendl conducting the Dallas Symphony) – have a high
level of interest simply because Heifetz’ playing is so good that it elevates
the works to as high a plane as they are capable of attaining.The Mozart concertos are less satisfactory –
Heifetz was scarcely steeped in Mozartean style – but the Sinfonia concertante, with William Primrose on viola (1956: Izler
Solomon conducting the RCA Victor Symphony), is a joy even if it is not
particularly idiomatic.Likewise, two
pairings of Heifetz with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky – the Brahms Double
Concerto (1960: Alfred Wallenstein conducting the RCA Victor Symphony) and
Vivaldi RV 547 (1964, with an unidentified chamber orchestra) – provide a
remarkable chance to hear the interplay between two of the 20th
century’s very best virtuosi, and are highly worthwhile on that basis even if
the performances themselves have less-than-optimal accompaniment and (in the
case of the Vivaldi) are not fully in touch with the music’s character.All these recordings have been very well
remastered, and the sound is more than adequate even though, understandably, it
is not up to the best modern standards.Having seven hours of Heifetz performances available in this boxed set
is a great pleasure on all levels.

There are eight hours
of music in the seven-CD Stravinsky release, and this box on Sony’s own label is
also a joy to have.Whether Stravinsky (1882-1971)
was the best possible interpreter of his own music is certainly arguable: The Peter Principle, which famously argued
that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, even suggested that
Stravinsky never reached that level as a composer but finally attained it as a
conductor.Certainly there are
conductors who brought more fire, intensity and analytical precision to
Stravinsky’s ballets than did the composer himself – Leonard Bernstein and
Pierre Boulez come immediately to mind – but there is no doubt that
Stravinsky’s own readings have tremendous structural care and an understanding
of the nuances of the music that leads to these recordings deservedly being
labeled authentic.Stravinsky did not
leave behind recordings of all his ballet music – the Danses concertantes are missing – but this set is nevertheless
highly valuable for the performances themselves as well as for the insight the
recordings provide into how Stravinsky saw his works from the podium.Petrushka
and Le Sacre du printemps get
more-straightforward readings here than elsewhere, coming across as more
balletic and less like extended tone poems – an interesting approach, if one
somewhat lacking in the high drama of other readings.But Pulcinella
is beautifully balanced, its roots in the 18th century quite clear;
and the less-often-heard scores, such as Renard,
Apollon musagète and Agon, come
off quite well indeed, although there are no texts provided or offered online
for the works that include vocal sections.Most of the recordings were made with the Columbia Symphony or Columbia
Chamber Ensemble, but Stravinsky did work with other groups as well: the CBC
Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra and Chicago Symphony
all appear here.The sound is variable
and not, in truth, as good as in the Heifetz set: the remastering seems to have
robbed it of some of its depth and richness, which were evident on the LPs on
which these performances first appeared.The earliest recording here, of Agon,
dates to 1957, the year the ballet was written; the latest, of the Firebird suite, was made in 1967.The time compression within a single decade
means the performances are a very good summation of Stravinsky’s thinking about
his ballet music toward the end of his life, and good examples of his podium
abilities as well.As a historical
document, this Stravinsky set is unmatched and a must-have for fans of the
composer – even though many people will likely want to supplement Stravinsky’s
own versions of his ballets with ones made by other conductors.

The beauties of which
voices are capable, singly or together, have intrigued and inspired composers
for many centuries – likely for as long as there has been music, which is a
very long time indeed.The beauty of Véronique Gens’ soprano is immediately
apparent in her new recording of Berlioz and Ravel – repertoire with which she
has not been closely associated, since she is known mainly for her work with
Baroque music and Mozart.But she
acquits herself beautifully here, her rich, expressive voice and faultless
pronunciation making all three works on this Ondine CD as emotionally and
musically involving as they can be.Herminie is the secular cantata for
which Berlioz famously failed to win the Prix de Rome in 1828.The Premier Grand Prix that year went to
Guillaume Despréaux, a composer
of so little note that although his birth year is known (1803), his year of
death is not (he mainly composed for the musical theater of his time).And the Deuxième Grand Prix in 1828 went to the almost equally obscure
Pierre-Julien Nargeot (1799-1891).Under
the circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that Berlioz’ Herminie has stolid elements, as befits a work written to order and
according to rigid specifications; but it also has considerable beauty, to
which Gens is quite sensitive.And its
first movement presents what would later become the idée fixe in the Symphonie
Fantastique of 1830.Les Nuits d’été is even later (1841) and represents fully
mature Berlioz – although, interestingly, the version for soprano and orchestra
was not created until 1856 (the work was originally for baritone, contralto or
mezzo-soprano with piano, although it is very rarely performed that way
nowadays).Four of the six songs in the
cycle are on the slow and dreamy side, and Gens’ expressiveness is fully on
display in them – but she also does a commendable job with the two liveliest
songs, Villanelle and L’île inconnue.Ravel’s Shéhérazade is of course a much later
work (1903), but the sensibilities of the three Tristan Klingsor poems have
much in common with those of the Berlioz works, and Gens handles this music
with the same sensitivity and vocal beauty that she brings to the earlier
compositions.The Orchestre National des
Pays de la Loire under John Axelrod provides supple and idiomatic backup
throughout, making this a CD filled with delights.

The pleasures are more
rarefied in Naxos’ two-CD set of Delius' A
Mass of Life and Prelude and Idyll.Delius himself is something of an acquired
taste, the subtle beauties of his scoring tending to make many of his poetic works
sound almost monochromatic.A Mass of Life is a very extended piece,
lasting more than an hour and a half, and is in many ways the antithesis of a
traditional Latin Mass, taking as its text a series of passages from
Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra.The Mass dates to 1905 but incorporates a
revised version of “Midnight Song,” also taken Nietzsche’s work, which Delius
had written in 1898.Delius is primarily
known for his smaller-scale music, and A
Mass of Life is his largest concert work – and is, in truth, a bit much to
take in a single setting, although that is how it was designed to be
heard.David Hill leads the work with
sensitivity and the sort of slow, meandering flow that is typical of Delius,
but A Mass of Life is not a piece
that will likely generate great enthusiasm for itself or its composer; as a
result, this release gets a (+++) rating.The Mass is joined here by a later work, Prelude and Idyll (1932), which originated in the discarded music
for an opera called Margot la rouge but
was changed by Delius into a purely orchestral, somewhat meandering piece about
the transience of life and love.

“Life and Breath” is
the title of a new Chandos CD of choral works by René Clausen (born 1953), and this too is a (+++) release that will
be an acquired taste for many listeners.There is a mass here, too, the first one Clausen has written: Mass for Double Choir (2011), a much
more traditional work than Delius’ in many ways, using the title “Mass” in its
more-accepted organized-religion sense and here receiving its première recording.In five movements and featuring two soprano
soloists (Sarah Tannehill and Pamela Williamson), Clausen’s Mass breaks little
new compositional ground but does show the continuing power that this old
affirmation of faith retains over at least some contemporary composers.The other works here draw in a similar way on
traditional religious themes, some of which go back to Bach or even beyond: All that hath life and breath, praise ye the
Lord (1978), O magnum mysterium
(2009), Magnificat (1988), Prayer (2009, a gently dissonant work
featuring words of Mother Teresa), O vos
omnes (1986) and Set me as a Seal
(1989, in which discussions between God and humans occur from both points of
view).Two works based on William
Blake’s poems and written in 2009, The
Tyger and The Lamb, are somewhat
less traditionally religious, but all the works on this CD – all of which are
performed quite well by the Kansas City Chorale under Charles Bruffy – tend to
blend together, since their themes and the underlying primarily-tonal structure
that Clausen favors in his compositions are so similar.A disc including a few of his secular works,
such as Jabberwocky or Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,
would make for more-interesting listening, although those of a traditional
religious orientation will find much that is meaningful on this CD.

Walt Whitman
considered life from a humanist and transcendentalist rather than traditionally
religious perspective, with the result that his works became the basis of music
by such kindred spirits as Charles Ives and Ralph Vaughan Williams – and even
Howard Hanson, who came at life from a somewhat different direction but, like
Vaughan Williams, called one of his works “A Sea Symphony” and based it on
Whitman’s texts.Adolphus Hailstork
(born 1941) uses some of those texts, too, in Whitman’s Journey—1. Launch Out on Endless Seas, part of an
all-Hailstork (++++) CD on Naxos.Hailstork’s communication is forthright and vivid, and he interprets
“endless seas” more metaphorically than did Vaughan Williams and Hanson,
looking at life itself as a sea and one’s life progress as a journey.Written in 2005, Whitman’s Journey has hymnlike qualities and an overall hopeful
outlook.The other pieces on this CD are
orchestral but no less effectively communicative.Symphony
No. 1 (1988) alternates bright and lyrical sections to good effect within a
traditional four-movement structure and a modest time span (21 minutes).Three
Spirituals (2005) were originally written for organ but sound just fine in
orchestral guise, thanks in part to the sheer familiarity of the tunes:
“Everytime I Feel the Spirit,” “Kum Ba Yah” and “Oh Freedom.”Fanfare
on Amazing Grace (2003) also uses a well-known spiritual as the basis for a
nicely balanced orchestral arrangement.And on the entirely secular side, An
American Port of Call (1985) neatly evokes the bustling busy-ness of
Norfolk, Virginia.Hailstork has written
many works for the Virginia Symphony, which plays his music with all the verve
and color it deserves – and with a sure sense of familiarity.JoAnn Falletta, a longtime and strong
advocate of less-known music with the Buffalo Philharmonic, is also Music
Director of the Virginia Symphony, which she leads with a firm and knowing hand
and from which she extracts nicely balanced sound.The directness of expression of Hailstork’s
music, coupled with the considerable skill with which he composes it, make this
CD a pleasure in both its choral and orchestral offerings.